Wings Over Scotland

Some random unordered thoughts on this evening’s events at Westminster.

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From the “Better Together” blog today:

“No doubt”? Now, we know that isn’t true, and what’s more we know that almost 70% of Scots don’t believe it either. So who are the No camp trying to fool?

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Okay, with the fundraiser now closed (at a fabulous £5,797) we’re about to send our second poll off to Mystery Professor X for some serious expert scrutiny, but there are still a couple of available slots for good questions.

Now would be a good time to fire suggestions at us in the comments.

About the poll, that is.

We’ve already briefly discussed Bill Jamieson’s article in today’s Scotsman claiming an independent Scotland will be more likely to suffer financial collapse and wouldn’t be able to afford to bail out its banking sector, that its economy will diverge from the rUK due to differing economic policies (making Sterling a millstone round Scotland’s neck), and that Scottish banks would relocate their headquarters to London as a result.

We’ve heard these dire tales of “too wee, too poor” inadequacy a thousand times. “But you couldn’t bail out the banks!” is perhaps the most scratched and worn-out disc in the No campaign’s entire DJ setlist of doom-and-gloom tunes. What we need is some sort of independence Woody Bop Muddy, but while we look for his number let’s yawn our way through this tired old scaremongering cobblers one more time.

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Alert readers will be aware of the occasional service provided by this site whereby we help out time-pressed citizens by letting them know when they can safely stop reading an article in the Scottish media. This morning we noticed a tweet from Unionist/Tory commentator Alex Massie, drawing attention to a Scotsman piece he described as “a v important column on banks. Not ‘Scaremongering'”.

Despite the obvious we respect Massie’s views on a lot of subjects, so we had a look.

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This was waiting when we got back to Wings HQ this evening:

“Dear Sir,

Thank you for taking the time to write.

I agree the leader column should have said Labour introduced the policy and we are printing a clarification. However, we are making no apologies for highlighting the ConDem witch-hunt against people like Anthony Walker.

Kindest regards

Allan Rennie
Editor in Chief

Media Scotland
Daily Record and Sunday Mail
Scottish & Universal Newspapers”

Fair enough. Can’t ask for more than that, and we’ve got no desire to see the Record apologise for continuing to highlight the appalling reality that is WCAs. It’s the paper’s finest quality. Nice to see part of the Scottish media holding up its hands and righting a wrong, too, rather than responding with censorship and tantrums. Naming no names.

…about the sales figures of “regional” Scottish newspapers, released today:

Numbers (for Jan-June 2013, compared to the same period in 2012) are below.

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We’ve recently been documenting the No campaign’s increasingly-panicked attempts to avoid, or entirely shut down, the Scottish independence debate by various means.

We were on the sharp end of it again last night, as the usual small group of frothing extremist BritNats and psychopathic stalkers (accompanied this time by a tiny handful of “useful idiots” from the SNP’s youth wing) tried to smear and discredit this site by crudely misrepresenting things I’ve said in a personal capacity over a number of years.

But it’s not just us the anti-independence camp is trying to muzzle.

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This site has on several occasions praised the Daily Record for its sustained – and almost alone in the UK media – campaigning against the callous savagery of “Work Capability Assessments” carried out for the Department of Work and Pensions by the ironically-named Atos Healthcare, though we’ve also pointed out the Record’s curious reluctance to mention how Atos came to be in that position.

Today, though, mere economy with the truth has evolved into all-out lying.

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In an interesting addition to the independence debate today, Jim Gallagher (former director-general for devolution in the UK government, and senior adviser to Prime Minister Gordon Brown on devolution strategy from 2007 to 2010) has written about the “positive case” from a business perspective for Scotland to remain in the UK.

His article for the Scotsman, entitled “Referendum comes down to money”,  is billed as “Rising to a challenge to make a positive case for the Union”. In it Gallagher argues that it’s only through membership of the Union that Scotland benefits from free trade.

Let’s see if he has a point.

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As befits quality investigative journalism, we’ve had our shadowy agents scouring the streets of Glasgow since yesterday looking for the location of the No campaign’s top-secret “public meeting” on Saturday. We think one of them may have stumbled across it, as we just received this encrypted image on our special secure email account.

(Apologies for the low resolution, but we’re having to use an old dial-up connection to stop “Better Together” hacking into it and revealing that we surreptitiously gave the milkman a £5 “bung” last week to bring round a daily pinta for our tea break.)

There’s a lot of cobblers talked about independence, so with only a limited number of hours in the day it’s important to know when you can safely stop reading something, because the person being quoted is clearly a clueless buffoon who’s forgotten to take the little green pills again and can be ignored without fear of missing anything.

In the case of the Herald’s lead story today, it’s four paragraphs in:

“He also warned the debate about self-government could lead to Orkney and Shetland, which are agitating for more powers, removing themselves and their oil wealth from Scotland.”

Yeah, thanks, Sir John Elvidge. Don’t call us, we’ll call you.